Ziker receives National Science Foundation award

Anthropology Professor John Ziker won a $265,860 National Science Foundation award for his project, "A Cross-Cultural Study of Variability in Economic Prosperity using Machine-Learning and Statistical Analysis."

This collaborative research project investigates the factors that impact heterogeneity in economic prosperity across more than 50 study sites globally. This phase of the project is jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.K. Research and Innovation. The institutions involved in the proposal include Boise State University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Santa Fe Institute.

The project's longitudinal research design tests and validates the extent to which variation in prosperity within sites is a function of network position and social organization. The structures of the high dimensional, correlated data are assessed using machine learning. A significant broader impact of data collection is the development of a robust and comparative cross-cultural dataset to be available to all researchers and interested stakeholders.

Ziker and Karl Mertens, a recent Ph.D. from Boise State's Ecology, Evolution and Behavior program, have been working at one of the study sites near Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. Cumulatively, wave one data across all sites encompasses more than 3,500 households and 60,000 unique individuals linked via social support and kinship connections, along with study site and national data. The project involves anthropologists with longstanding ethnographic knowledge of the study communities, who have collectively dedicated over 60 months of fieldwork to the project to date. The project also involves economists specializing in the topics of complex systems and social network analysis.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2448790.

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